The already-high stakes of workplace violence recently got raised.

For the first time, OSHA has given its inspectors guidelines for investigating violent incidents at work – and chances are they’ll respond with more inspections and fines.

Employers in high-risk businesses like health care, low-income services and retail banking are the most likely to be inspected.

Free Training Video - "Workplace Violence: How to Spot and React to the Early Warning Signs"

Workplace hazard
But any employer can be the target of a post-violence inspection if three or more people are hurt, or one is killed, and OSHA deems the incident resulted from a “workplace hazard” — which could range from a particularly risky time of day, to a dangerous location.

One way of minimizing workplace violence: Train people to recognize the tell-tale signs that someone is likely to turn violent, and encourage them to report such signs.

Watch out for employees who:

• are feared or considered unpleasantly odd by a number of co-workers.
• obsess about something – the job, a celebrity, a co-worker who has no interest in them.
• regularly claim they are being unfairly targeted by co-workers or management, or that conspiracies are controlling politics or economics.
• frequently grow angry or argumentative.
• express desperation about financial, family or personal matters.
• constantly want to “get” someone for wronging them.
• talk a lot about media reports of violence, and/or the killing power of weapons.

See the OSHA guidelines at: www.osha.gov/SLTC/workplaceviolence/index.html

If you were asked why you use progressive discipline, how would you reply? A lot of managers would say you do it as a systematic way of documenting misconduct or poor performance, so you can eventually get rid of egregious offenders.

That’s not a bad answer, but it’s not a complete one, either.

Sometimes employees are just having temporary problems – a lapse in behavior, a poor series of decisions – that aren’t necessarily grave enough to warrant termination. In these cases, progressive discipline gives managers the tools to save the job of an endangered employee who is, on balance, worth keeping.

This kind of progressive discipline is called the “career advocate” model – because the manager is working with the employee to save his career with the organization, not against the employee to get rid of him.

"The Manager's Guide to Progressive Discipline"

The career advocate approach gives employers a chance to pull valuable people back from the brink. And if that can’t be done, it offers you a diplomatic way of persuading those who can’t be salvaged that they’ll actually be better off elsewhere.

The career advocate approach can be summed up in five steps:

1. State the problem and lay out the consequences
2. Frame the conversation in terms of the employee’s career
3. Position yourself as the career advocate
4. Find out why there’s misalignment between employee and company goals
5. Try to re-establish alignment

Based on the facts presented in the scenario below, how do you think the court ruled on this employment-law case?

“Rosalee Higgins claims you told her she was fired,” HR manager Katrina van Leuwen told supervisor Bob Tandy.

“No, that would have been the wrong thing to do,” Bob replied. “She was complaining about alleged harassment, and I know if you fire somebody who’s making a harassment complaint, you can get in big trouble.”

“I’m glad you’re aware of that,” Katrina said. “What did you tell her?”

“I listened to what she had to say, and read what she had written down,” Bob said. “The complaint sounded bogus to me, so after we’d talked for 45 minutes I wadded it up and threw it in the trash. Then I said I wanted her out of there,” Bob said. “I admit, I was fed up.”

A question of interpretation
“Didn’t you also say you never wanted to see her again?” Katrina prompted. “That could sound like you were firing her.”

“No,” Bob said. “I said I didn’t care if I ever saw her again. Different point. I was very disappointed in her. I didn’t fire her.”

“Another thing,” he went on. “When I told her to get out, I didn’t mean permanently. It was the end of the day and I wanted to close the book and move on.”

“You may have to tell that to a judge,” Katrina said. “Rosalee is suing us for retaliation. Of course, our position is that she refused to return to work, even after I explained she wasn’t fired.”

Free Training Video - "Retaliation: Four Key Mistakes That Supervisors Must Avoid"

The Decision
Yes, Rosalee got a court to agree her retaliation lawsuit should not be dismissed and should be heard by a jury.

The court said it wasn’t unreasonable for Rosalee to assume supervisor Bob was firing her. His statement about never wanting to see her again, or never caring if he did, was enough for her to draw that conclusion, especially after he’d said he “wanted her out of here.”

And although the company tried to get her to come back to work a couple of days later, Bob’s conduct was still enough to dissuade a reasonable employee from making a harassment complaint. That’s the legal definition of retaliation.

Takeaway: It’s easy to lose your temper – or control over what you say – when an employee makes a complaint you consider unfounded or frivolous. Don’t. Bite your tongue, squeeze a stress ball, take a walk outside; do whatever you must to avoid words that may resonate in court long after you’ve said them.

Cite: Young-Losee v. Graphic Packaging International, No. 10-2012, 8th Cir., 1/26/11.

We like to think of teamwork as the ultimate organizational good. Team players support co-workers, sublimate their egos for the benefit of the larger group, and help bring about greater innovation and productivity.

It follows, then, that the more tightly knit the team, the better the team will perform. Or does it?

Check out "A Four-Point Model for Leading High-Performance Teams" for FREE and give your organization’s managers the tools they need to find the best people, make the most of their talents and keep them happy and loyal.

Such a thing as too close
Two faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School recently published a research paper suggesting that teams which are too tightly knit may resist outside input and end up hurting themselves.

The researchers studied the reaction of 252 subjects to new information, and found there was a big difference, depending on whether the subjects worked alone or in teams of two.

Subjects working alone on the research task – estimating answers to questions like “What percentage of Americans own pets?” – adjusted their estimates by 33% on average when presented with outside estimates that differed from theirs.

But those working in teams adjusted their answers by just 20%, showing greater resistance to outside information – even when it was potentially helpful.

The researchers suggested that a couple of factors were at work here:

• Team members believed since both their opinions went into the initial estimate, it was more reliable than if just one person had come up with it.
• Team members wanted to maintain the team’s social cohesion.

What’s all this mean for your organization? For one thing, managers may want to make special efforts to “open up” their team to new members and/or reshuffle teams that have been together for extended periods.

Source: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Just four months after being named top guy, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is no longer with the company. Prior to the announcement that he was resigning for health reasons, it was discovered that he lied on his resume. Thompson claimed to have graduated with a degree in computer science, though his university did not offer such a degree until well after he left.

In light of the scandal, Yahoo is dealing with some unfortunate and embarrassing press. The sad part is, this could easily have been avoided.

We’ll never know what exactly happened at Yahoo in the days surrounding Thompson’s hire and subsequent departure, but his resume fiasco should serve as a lesson to all hiring managers.

‘The Best Interview Questions To Smoke Out Impostors’

Under pressure
Hiring managers are often under pressure to fill a position in a hurry, for various reasons: The job is a really important one, the position has been vacant too long, some line manager is complaining about being short-staffed.

So when a job candidate like Scott Thompson comes along, with a pristine resume and a history of getting results, it’s tempting to forego the process of doing your homework and asking the difficult questions to be sure your candidate is as perfect as he or she looks on paper.

But Yahoo has now proven why hiring managers need to overcome that temptation and dig deeper into a candidate’s history. Not only is Yahoo making headlines for a questionable hiring decision, they have to go through the entire process again — all because the hiring team didn’t want to look into a resume that seemed too good to be true.

It doesn’t matter if you’re hiring a CEO or an intern who will work in the mailroom; hiring managers need to take a long, hard look at every job candidate to make sure the person is really capable of performing the task at hand. The consequences for failing to do so just became a little bit clearer.

No doubt you’ve heard that managers – both in HR and elsewhere in the organization – should “show some love” to employees if they want to encourage their best efforts.

And that’s true … as far as it goes.

But a surprising research study shows that demonstrations of appreciation from managers, while they do increase employee engagement, are less effective at it than other kinds of positive events that are also within managers’ control.

The study was done by Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School and independent researcher Steven Kramer. They collected 12,000 diary entries from 238 professionals in seven companies over a period of several years.

Three types of ‘events’
In this extensive study, employees diarized about three main types of events at work that they saw as positive forces, making them happy and increasing their determination to give of their best.

The researchers classified the three kinds of events as:

• “Nourishing.” These included shows of respect, encouragement or appreciation from a manager or other authority figure.
• “Catalytic.” These took place when employees were given resources or training that enabled them to improve their performance.
• “Progress.” These occurred when employees were able to move forward on a project or accomplish something meaningful.

"Why Employee Praise Can Backfire – And How to Do It Right"

What worked
If you followed the pure logic of managerial appreciation, you’d say that the “nourishing” events were the most effective at floating employees’ boats.

But in fact, the study found that they were the least effective.

On employees’ best days – the days when they reported going home happy – their diaries showed a heavy preponderance of progress events.

The distribution of events on those happy days broke down like this: 76% progress events, 43% catalytic events, and just 25% nourishing events.

Conversely, employees’ worst days were the days when they suffered setbacks, the opposite of progress. On these days, employees cited setbacks 67% of the time.

Action steps for managers
What does all this mean for managers?

First, let’s be clear about what the study doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean managers should suddenly refrain from praising employees who have merited a pat on the back. Encouragement still works, especially when it’s sincere and timely.

The study’s results do mean, however, that if praise is the only tool managers use to motivate and engage employees, they’re missing some big chances.

Here are three action steps that the study suggests managers can take:

• Find out whether nagging resource issues are holding people back, and address them where possible. It may surprise you how often fixable computer glitches or small equipment malfunctions can weigh on employees’ minds and productivity. Or how often a lack of knowledge or skill that feels to the person like a major hindrance can be addressed in just an afternoon of training.
• To create and/or capitalize on feelings of progress, meet with each employee and help them identify milestones on the path toward their goals. Then as they hit these milestones, celebrate their incremental successes. You don’t have to throw a party; sometimes a handwritten note is enough. (Note: Here you’re leveraging a “nourishing” event to underline a “progress” event!)
• To minimize the effect of setbacks, let the employee know you noticed and are sorry the setback happened. Then start getting the person back on the path to progress by setting a new milestone that is achievable. And of course, monitor their efforts to hit that milestone.

Imagine a photograph of a landscape with a horse, a cow and a hill. One observer says, “That’s a horse.” Another says, “That’s a cow.” A third says, “That’s a hill.”

Why would three people have such different views of the same photo? Well, possibly the photographer has cropped and framed the photo differently for each – so that the horse, or the cow, or the hill, becomes the central object.

What’s this got to do with the day-to-day management of your department or team?

Different views
A lot. As with our photo, different employees take different views of workplace problems and situations, depending on the frame they see them through.

But as you seek to motivate employees to behave in productive ways, you don’t have to accept their frames. Often, you’ll be able to exert a greater and more positive influence by reframing issues to suit your purpose.

Example: Barbara and James battle constantly about whose job it is to enter the daily sales reports into the database. You call them in, and as they discuss the issue, you see their frame: They both consider the task a tedious chore, which has to be done at the end of the day and sometimes keeps the person doing it at work past 5 p.m.

The frame of peace
You realize there’s a better frame. So you explain that the first thing the sales force does each morning is look at the sales reports from the previous day. That helps the salespeople schedule their calls and callbacks, and is essential to their success – and the company’s revenue stream.

James and Barbara exchange looks. And from then on, they share the data-entry duty evenly and amicably.

Free Training Videos - "Leadership Training for Managers & Supervisors"

Source: “Increase Your Influence at Work,” by McIntosh and Luecke.

photo credit: garycycles3

For years, Gretchen has been one of your best workers. Now, there’s been an important change in her life – she just converted to an evangelical Christian denomination, and her new faith makes big demands on her.

You’re fine with Gretchen’s choice – she seems happier and more motivated than ever. But then one day she comes to your office and tells you she can’t wear the uniform your organization requires any more.

“Why?” you ask, puzzled.

“My church has a very strict code on what’s considered modest attire,” she says. “We believe women shouldn’t wear pants, and pants are part of the company uniform. I’m sorry if this causes a problem, but I have to obey my conscience.”

What do you do now? Tell Gretchen she has to conform to the company dress code or face discipline? Exempt her from wearing the uniform, and face complaints from other employees who may not be thrilled about the uniform, either?

Free Training Video - "Religious Accommodation: What Every Supervisor Must Know"

A tough call
It’s a tough call. And to make it, you need to understand federal law on religious discrimination and accommodation.

In this case, it may seem to you that Gretchen is refusing to obey a company rule. But what she’s really doing – if you understand the situation properly – is making a request for a religious accommodation.

And the law requires you to try to accommodate a sincerely held religious belief, unless it would cause undue hardship for your organization. That’s not the case here.

So what you could do, for instance, is ask Gretchen whether she’d be willing to wear a skirt and keep the rest of the uniform. She’s already stated that the pants are the issue, so your compromise suggestion should be acceptable to her. (If it’s not, you may have a problem that goes beyond religion, and you’ll want to kick it upstairs to higher management or HR.)

Veteran HR people and managers are aware of some of the traps an interviewer can step into – like leaning toward people who share your interests, or favoring the physically attractive candidate.

But how about the “best of a bad lot” trap? That one can spring when:

• You’re in a hurry to fill a job, and
• The candidates you’ve interviewed so far are all worse than mediocre.

‘The Best Interview Questions To Smoke Out Impostors’

Now, if a candidate who’s even semi-competent walks into your office, you may see her as a winner, because you’re comparing her – perhaps unconsciously – to a bunch of losers.

Big mistake. Just because this person is better than lousy doesn’t mean she can do the job.

To avoid this trap and see more clearly, you can:

• Ask yourself: Would I hire this person if she were the only candidate I’d seen?
• Get a second opinion. Another interviewer, who hasn’t seen the bad candidates, will have a sharper view of the only slightly better one.

Source: “The Everything HR Kit,” by Putzier and Baker.

HR pros are well aware that workers under stress are likely to suffer from declining productivity and plummeting morale.

But have you stopped to think about the occupational safety and health consequences of stress? This isn’t just a concern for your Safety department; it’s also an HR issue.

And it’s a timely one, too: Over the past 20 years, the number of people reporting that stress affects their work has increased fourfold.

Yet stress is often overlooked by managers from both the productivity and the safety standpoint.

Reasons to care
Here are the two main reasons why stress is worthy of your attention and that of line managers:

Subtle, insidious
According to Ted Boyce, a behavioral scientist who specializes in workplace issues, the psychology of stress is subtle and insidious. Unless people are made aware of its causes and symptoms, they may get caught in a “cycle of distress” – where stress leads to fatigue leads to more stress – before they can figure out what’s happening.

So what can you do to manage and mitigate stress in your workplace?

Boyce sees both macro- and micro-answers. The former have to do with overall workplace culture, the latter with employees’ daily routines.

Let’s check the big picture first. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) sees five big stressors in the workplace:

1. Lack of participation in decision-making, leading employees to feel their work lives are out of their hands.
2. Lack of support from co-workers and/or supervisors, creating feelings of isolation.
3. Conflicting or unclear job expectations.
4. Physical environment problems like noise or crowding.
5. Job insecurity.

You may not be able to address all these issues directly. But you can bring them to the attention of top managers and point out the consequences.

Also, you could organize a company-wide initiative to look at stress, in partnership with Safety, Operations and Facilities Management. You can start with NIOSH’s research to help persuade others that stress is both a productivity and a safety issue.

Changing it up
Where you and your allies can have an immediate impact, though, is by helping workers “bust stress” through healthy changes in their routines.

Here are some of the changes you could encourage them to adopt:

• Be punctual. Employees can reduce their feeling of being rushed – a major contributor to stress – by arriving at work on time, and returning from lunch and breaks on time as well.
• Enjoy R&R. Employees need their scheduled breaks. Anybody who frequently works through breaks is a high-potential stress candidate.
• Break the monotony. Even an efficient routine can become stressful if it’s never varied. Encourage workers to mix things up a little.
• Monitor physical responses. Help workers heed the physiological signs of stress – such as rapid breathing or heart rate, tenseness and headaches. When these symptoms strike, even a two-minute break for fresh air and deep breathing can help a lot.
• Take control where possible. Encourage people to personalize their areas, and keep their workplace clean and organized. Frustration at an inability to find materials or tools adds substantially to existing stress.
• Say “no” when appropriate. The stress of conflicting expectations can be better managed by employees who know how to say “no” at the right times, in the right way. You’ll need to educate both employees and supervisors on this one.

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I used to work for a guy who started every job interview with “So, what are you good at?” Then, later on, he’d asked, “Okay, now tell me what you’re not so good at.”

When I was in college, the job placement office told us we had to have an answer for that question. I assume everybody who coaches job candidates does the same. Which is why few candidates were ever surprised by the question.

What’s surprising was how bad their answers were.

For example:

• “Well, some people say I take my work too seriously. I’m sort of a workaholic.”
• “I’ve been told that I’m too hard on myself. I set my expectations too high.”
• “I’m a little too impatient.”

These are, of course, examples of dressing up a strength as a weakness, which is manipulative and unhelpful. Sharp interviewers are looking for evidence of two things when they ask the “What are your weaknesses” question:

Candor. Only phonies pretend they have no weaknesses. If they lie about that, what else will they lie about?

Confidence. People who know their strengths have the self-assurance to admit a weakness.

I once had a guy applying for a senior executive position tell me, “I’m very good at overseeing high-level employees but not very effective with low-level employees.” When I pushed him about why he was ineffective, he said he knew exactly which levers to pull to motivate high-level employees but not low-level ones.

I could see it bothered him a little. He wanted to be better at understanding the rank and file. Admitting this weakness made him seem human to me. Since his job would be to oversee high-level employees, his weakness wouldn’t hurt him. Admitting it gave him credibility in my eyes.

"Leadership Credibility: The Fallibility Paradox"

“As I already told you, we terminated Georgia Minsky because we needed to eliminate a position. Hers seemed like the logical one,” supervisor Tom Schmidt told plaintiff’s lawyer Justin Case.

“I heard you say that,” Case said. “But hadn’t you initially decided that a different position was the one to eliminate, and you changed your mind only after Ms. Minsky requested six weeks of FMLA leave?”

“I changed my mind, yes,” Tom said. “But I don’t like your implication that it was because of Georgia’s leave request. I reviewed the matter and decided it would be less disruptive to the department to let her go than Larry Butts, after all.”

What he said
“Just to refresh your memory, here’s your e-mail to your own manager,” Case said, unfolding a computer printout.

“You say, ‘The team was already preparing for Georgia’s leave, so her definitive departure shouldn’t have any immediate impact.’ Sounds like you were taking her leave into account in your decision.”

“But let’s put that aside and look at the notes you typed up about your meeting with your boss where you discussed terminating my client,” the lawyer said.

“These notes are dated two days before she made her request,” Case went on.

Backdated?
“But neither your calendar nor your boss’s reflects a meeting between the two of you on that day. Isn’t it true that you typed up the notes weeks later, after my client filed suit, and backdated them to create the false impression that the termination discussions started before she requested FMLA leave?”

“My calendar doesn’t reflect every meeting I have,” Tom said. “Things come up and you have to deal with them. I did type up the notes later, but I had no intention of deceiving anybody about when the meeting happened. Or about the reasons for terminating Georgia.”

Did Georgia win her FMLA retaliation case?
The verdict
Yes, Georgia got the court to agree that her case was worthy of going to a jury. That represented a defeat for the company, which had to decide whether to go to the expense of a jury trial or instead settle the suit out of court.

The court said that the uncertainty over the timing of Tom’s notes and the date of the meeting suggested that he might have been trying to create a paper trail.

And the e-mail about the change in which position to eliminate supported Georgia’s claim that her request for leave did lead to her termination. Both the e-mail’s timing – immediately after she asked for leave – and its content might look dubious to a jury, the court said.

Cite: Shaffer v. American Medical Association, No. 10-2117, 3rd Cir., 10/18/11.

Everybody knows that engaged employees try harder, do more, and create better feelings around them than their more blase co-workers.

As a manager, you have a big responsibility for the engagement – or disengagement – of your department or team.

Employee development consultancy Blessing White suggests that if you’re interested in fostering a higher level of engagement, you first ask yourself these seven questions:

• How engaged is each team member? If you’re not sure, how will you find out?
• What do you know about each person’s interests and aspirations?
• What can you do to ensure they understand organizational priorities?
• What feedback do they need to increase their performance?
• What type of support does each team member want? If you don’t know, how will you find out?
• How strong are your relationships with team members – really?
• Do team members understand your personal motivation? Do you understand theirs?

Source: www.blessingwhite.com

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Adam has always been a temperamental, bristly employee, but today he’s gone too far. He’s just told you to your face that you’re a son-of-a-b****. With your temper rising and the blood pounding in your head, you tell him he’s fired for insubordination.

When you cool down, you reflect that, yes, maybe, you lost control of your emotions a little bit, but who wouldn’t? And you had justification to fire Adam, because your organization’s policy specifically identifies insubordination as grounds for termination.

So you’re OK, right?

Well, maybe. But it’s also very possible that you’ve put your employer at risk. That’s because you’ve done one thing you should never, never, never do.

The ‘one thing’
What is that “one thing”?

Never fire an employee when you’re angry. It sounds simple if you think about it, but when you’re steamed, you may NOT think about it. If you do fire someone when you’re angry, you may be giving the person grounds for a lawsuit.

How? Well, maybe what the person did hasn’t been a firing offense in the past, and might not have been in this case, except that it made you mad. And if the person is in a protected class, they can argue that you imposed overly strict discipline on them BECAUSE of their race, or sex, or age, or whatever.

And whether the person has a viable discrimination case or not, they’re far more likely to go to court when they’re fired abruptly — because your anger makes them mad in turn.

"How to Terminate an Insubordinate Employee – Without Provoking a Lawsuit"

Wielding the ax
Of course, there may still be cases where you have to wield the ax immediately — when somebody threatens or commits violence, intentionally damages company property or creates a serious safety hazard, for example. But in many if not most instances, termination for a firing offense doesn’t have to be done on the spot.

So instead of acting on the spur of the moment, walk away and calm down. Then document the incident and, if necessary, consult with HR or higher management about the termination you think is warranted. You’ll make better decisions this way — decisions that will stand up if challenged in court.

So the worst has happened, and an employee or job applicant has decided to take legal action against your organization for – supposedly – discriminating against him or her.

You sigh. Now you’re in for months or even years of adversarial, expensive proceedings with the EEOC and/or in court. Things look bleak.

But wait. Don’t start counting the sleeping pills in the drawer of your night table yet. The case doesn’t have to waste a lot of time and money, and cause a lot of bitterness. There is a possible out: EEOC mediation.

What it is
What’s that?

Well, it’s not a formal investigation, and it’s not a court. It’s not even binding on the employer or employee – unless they reach an agreement on the dispute that both sides are OK with.

Here’s what happens: Most times, after an employee files an EEOC charge, the agency will suggest to both employer and employee that they sit down with a mediator. This is a specialist third party who’s seen dozens of employment discrimination disputes, and can recommend a number of ways of voluntarily solving the disagreement. Both parties have to accept mediation for it to take place.

The mediator’s magic, according to experts who have attended mediation sessions, lies in his or her ability to back the parties off their initial positions, which are usually both firmly held and emotionally fraught, and get each side to see the other’s point.

The EEOC says the typical mediation session lasts just three or four hours. If the parties reach agreement through mediation – sometimes a simple apology is enough to do the trick! – the process ends. A written agreement is signed by both sides, and becomes an enforceable document.

Less time, expense
The EEOC says mediation, when it works, usually takes less than three months to settle a case – compared with the months or years that a resolution may take when the case goes through the full EEOC process and/or the courts.

There is no cost to attend the mediation session, although you’ll likely have costs associated with it, such as for lawyers to help you prepare. Experts estimate the cost of mediation somewhere in the low four figures, a very economical price tag compared with the alternatives. (There could be additional costs if, say, an employer undertook to pay an employee money as part of the agreement.)

Either or both parties can bring lawyers to the session, and the mediator will decide what role they should play.

Other advantages
Experts on mediation point out that there are many advantages associated with it, beyond the savings in time and money.

Among these advantages:

• No fault. The mediator’s job isn’t to determine the guilt or innocence of either employer or employee. It’s to try to find enough common ground on which to base an agreement.
• Confidentiality. The parties sign an agreement that the mediation will remain confidential. This means nobody – not other employees, not even EEOC investigators – will get a look at the information produced during mediation.
• Calming influence. It’s axiomatic that an angry employee is the employee who’s likely to cost you the most money in an employment discrimination dispute. The mediation process helps remove anger and bitterness from the equation.
• Information on workplace conditions. One employee’s grievance may be a grievance waiting to happen for others. Suppose a female employee complains that a certain supervisor mistreated her. You learn during mediation that he’s also mistreated other women who haven’t yet complained. This knowledge may allow you to deal with him and head off further complaints.

See: www.eeoc.gov/employees/mediation.cfm

Free Training Video - "Retaliation: Four Key Mistakes That Supervisors Must Avoid"

“We just heard from Amber Austin,” HR Director Cal Norris told supervisor Frieda Kohl. “Actually, from her lawyer. She’s suing us for pregnancy discrimination.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, after she just stopped showing up for work,” Frieda said. “But I don’t see that she has any grounds for a suit.”

“She says she miscarried, and it’s our fault for not accommodating her,” Cal said. “She claims it was the heavy lifting here that did it.”

“She miscarried once before, so obviously she has a tendency to lose her babies,” Frieda said. “That’s not our fault.”

Whose fault?
“She says both her miscarriages were because we wouldn’t accommodate her,” Cal replied. “Look, I don’t believe we did anything wrong, but you and I need to go over the whole thing before we talk to our lawyers.”

“OK,” Frieda said. “You know that stock handlers like Amber have to be able to lift up to 30 pounds. Well, the first time Amber told me she was pregnant, she had a doctor’s note saying she couldn’t lift more than 20.”

“I tried to help out and gave her light work for a couple of shifts, but the third or fourth day I needed her back on the heavier stuff,” Frieda went on. “So I moved her back there. And, yeah, a couple days later she miscarried.”

no light work
“Under our policy, you didn’t have to give her light work at all,” Cal put in. “You could have insisted she apply for an open position elsewhere in the store, or take a leave of absence. That’s what we do for everybody with a short-term health issue that isn’t work-related.”

“I know,” Frieda said. “I’ve applied the policy to other people in the past. So, when Amber got pregnant again a couple of months later, and had a 10-pound lifting restriction, I told her we had no light work for her. I said she’d have to take leave, per the policy.”

“But she insisted she wasn’t sick, and needed to keep working, but on something light, like folding clothing,” Frieda said. “She accused me of being heartless when I refused. She left, and that was the last time I saw her.”

“Apparently she miscarried for the second time a few days later,” Cal said. “That doesn’t look good for us, but I think we acted properly.”

Did Amber win her pregnancy discrimination case?

Management Lesson
No, a judge said the company didn’t discriminate against Amber because of her pregnancy.

The key: Supervisor Frieda applied the company’s across-the-board policy on short-term disability in the same way to Amber as she had to others.

The judge said employers are under no obligation to treat pregnant employees better than other workers with short-term medical conditions. And that is essentially what Amber was asking for.

Cite: Arizanovska v. Wal-Mart Stores, No. 1:09-cv-1404, S.D. Ind., 9/22/11.

"The ‘Self-Check Technique’ for Revealing Unconscious Bias"

Every manager hopes to reach a point where they are viewed as a credible leader. But it takes hard work, and few managers get there. Check out this action plan for achieving leadership credibility:

1. Identify your Confidence Base

That’s not always easy. In fact, lots of failed and mediocre leaders go their entire lives without ever figuring it out. But successful leaders do. They may be good at many things, but they know they’re GREAT at one thing. They focus relentlessly on developing that skill, it becomes their Confidence Base, and they use it to build credibility and advance their careers.

‘Leadership Credibility: The Confidence Base’

2. Commit to Knowledge Transfer

The world is full of mediocre leaders who fail to achieve results through others. They may lead a team but they rely on their OWN competence to get things done. They don’t replicate their competence. They don’t empower others. And so their impact is limited.

Successful leaders channel the passion they had for building their own Confidence Base into passion for transferring their technical competence to others. They develop, in effect, a new Confidence Base and a new source of credibility, in leadership. They achieve the multiplier effect, and their impact is enormous.

3. Remember that credibility is fragile

It takes years to build your leadership credibility, but you can lose it very quickly, through one or two incidents where your words don’t match your actions. Your followers watch what you do and remember these slips. A simple rule: Be consistent about walking the talk.

If you have hourly workers who punch a clock, don’t let them get in the habit of clocking in before they’re supposed to start. That’s the lesson from a recent case at a factory in Indiana.

A shift supervisor often punched in 15-45 minutes ahead of the start of the 5 a.m. shift. She said she had to set up the day’s work before the crew arrived.

When the supervisor quit after eight years, she sued, claiming hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime.

Eventually, the company got the case dismissed, with the court ruling that the employer had no way of knowing the supervisor was doing overtime. The court pointed out that:

• The company had a policy requiring pre-approval of overtime, which the employee never sought.
• The owners of the business arrived two or three hours later than the shift workers, and so did not observe the unauthorized overtime being done.
• The supervisor never reported errors in her pay or asked for overtime pay.

Nonetheless, the evidence indicated that many workers would clock in early, socialize over coffee for 10 or 15 minutes, then start work; and that the owners knew this and condoned it.

Had they cracked down on early punch-ins, they would have avoided the supervisor’s getting into the early arrival habit that eventually turned into a long-running court case.

Cite: Kellar v. Summit Seating Inc., No. 11-1221, 7th Cir., 12/14/11.

‘FLSA Overtime Regulations: Sorting Out Exempt vs. Non-Exempt Employees’

Every other week, The HR Cafe takes a moment to recognize the other great bloggers sharing their insights on leadership, compliance, and other topics relevant to HR professionals. Here are this week’s best HR blog posts from around the web:

-Michael Brisciana from HR Perspectives has some advice for new managers.

-HR Capitalist Kris Dunn offers 5 reasons why you hire externally, and it might not always be worth it.

Finally, from Mindflash: How Workplace ‘Strength Training’ Produces Top Performers

Free Training Videos - "Leadership Training for Managers & Supervisors"

It would be nice to think that you and your company’s experienced line managers are all totally non-prejudiced individuals. You’re reasonable people, you know the laws on workplace discrimination, and you steer carefully clear of any kind of discrimination against ANY employee.

But does that mean you’re completely bias-free? Unfortunately, no.

The problem isn’t that you INTEND to discriminate. Rather, it’s that EVERYBODY, no matter how well-meaning, harbors certain unconscious biases that can crop up at the most inconvenient times – like when deciding who to hire, or whether to promote somebody, or what discipline to mete out to someone.

What do we mean by an unconscious bias? Here are a few examples:

• Young people are lazy
• Old people can’t learn new things
• New parents aren’t reliable because they have child care needs

Ideas like these lurk in all of our brains, whether completely or partially submerged. They’re part of the way we build our construct of the world: We paint simplified pictures that allow us to lead our daily lives without holding a mental filibuster over EVERY action.

Now of course, the law doesn’t police the contents of your brain. But if you ACT on biases like these, you are very likely to get in trouble.

So what can you do?

Well, you could try what we call the “Self-Check Technique.” It involves asking yourself four questions before you take personnel action involving any employee. They are:

• Will this action adversely affect the person?
• Is the person in a protected class?
• What are my potential biases (i.e., gender, race, disability, etc.)?
• Am I doing this for the right reason, or is one of my biases affecting my decision?

By doing this kind of self check, you can avoid acting on unconscious prejudices that get you into a mess you’ll be all too conscious of.

"The ‘Self-Check Technique’ for Revealing Unconscious Bias"

Question 1: Do you have to put up with a front-line customer service rep whose English is so fractured that customers go away scratching their heads in perplexity?

Question 2: Do you have to put up with a front-line customer service rep whose English is perfectly comprehensible, but whose accent is odd enough that customers frequently comment on it?

Those two cases – close but not identical – illustrate the difficulties that companies and managers face in complying with federal law against language discrimination. Because while the answer to #1 is “of course not” – you don’t have to employ somebody whose bad English costs you business – the answer to #2 is “yes” – an accent that’s merely odd is no excuse for getting rid of somebody.

But how exactly can you be sure whether you’re facing situation 1, when you can legally take action, and situation 2, when you can’t?

"The ‘Self-Check Technique’ for Revealing Unconscious Bias"

Here’s the key concept in the law: “Material interference.” In other words, when an employee’s lack of fluency or accent “materially interferes” with their ability to do their job, you can transfer the person, send them for mandatory language training, or even – as a last resort – fire them.

It’s easy to see how poor fluency or a totally impenetrable accent (as opposed to one that is just strange) would materially interfere with a customer service rep’s performance.

But what about a data entry clerk whose English is very poor, but who doesn’t have to talk to anybody – customers or co-workers – very often? This second person’s lack of language proficiency probably doesn’t materially interfere with his job, and if you discipline or fire the person you’ll probably be illegally discriminating on the basis of language.

Based on the facts presented in the scenario below, how do you think the court ruled on this employment-law case?

“So did you not say, in a conversation with the manager you were replacing, that you understood my client had done something she should have been fired for?” plaintiff’s lawyer Justin Case asked supervisor Brad Hurley.

“I said I’d heard something like that,” Brad corrected. “I never said I believed Ms. Wolfe should be fired.”

“And yet within two months after you took over the department, you dismissed her,” Case said. “The reason given was that her position was eliminated. “But wasn’t the real reason that she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against another manager? Weren’t you in fact retaliating against her?”

Position eliminated
“Not at all,” Brad protested. “We documented the fact that Tanya’s position had become unnecessary, given the changes in our business.”

“But didn’t you then go out and hire two more employees to do work quite similar to what my client had been doing?” Case asked.

“No,” Brad said. “Those hires are doing different kinds of work.”

“So you say,” Case said. “But tell me, what were you referring to when you talked about something that might get Tanya fired? Did you mean her harassment complaint?”

“I’m not sure now what I was referring to,” Brad said.

“The person you were speaking to has no doubt you were referring to Ms. Wolfe’s complaint,” Case said.

Did the employee win her retaliation case?

The decision
Yes, Tanya won an important preliminary victory when a federal appeals court said her case should be heard by a jury.

The court leaned heavily on supervisor Brad’s comment about the employee having done something she could be fired for. Although the company argued that this comment was ambiguous, the court said it didn’t see what else Brad might have been referring to other than her sexual harassment complaint.

And if the manager who eventually did fire her was already talking about her firing when he took up his position, and over something she had a legal right to do, that suggested the “elimination of her position” was a pretext for retaliation.

The lesson
Once an employee has engaged in “protected activity” – complaining of harassment or discrimination, testifying in someone else’s discrimination case and the like – supervisors must be very careful what they say about the person. Remarks that could be construed as hostile may leave you in a tough position if you later have to take adverse action against the person – even for good reasons.

Cite: Egan v. Freedom Bank, No. 10-1214, 7th Cir., 10/6/2011. Fictionalized for dramatic effect.

Free Training Video - "Retaliation: Four Key Mistakes That Supervisors Must Avoid"

Sunday night I watched as HBO premiered the second season of Game of Thrones, the award-winning TV series based on the fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. For those unfamiliar, the series is about wealthy families vying for power in a medieval land filled with dragons, wolves the size of horses and undead warriors.

In the premiere, we saw three armed factions at war over who would claim the throne, recently vacated by the death of King Robert. And there’s a common theme among the three leaders that should interest you whether you’re a Thrones watcher or not:

All three would make terrible managers.

Let’s analyze the management shortcomings of each pretender to the throne, and try to derive a how-not-to lesson from each.

1) First there’s Joffrey, the spoiled 13-year-old who (falsely) believes the kingdom is his by birthright and abuses his subjects just for fun. Joffrey’s only goal is to assert his own authority, and he kills or humiliates anyone who dares question him.

Why he’d make a terrible manager: Let’s leave aside the fact that Joffrey is an insufferable brat. Presumably you don’t have any of those among your managers. But you may have some command-and-control types, and that’s what’s wrong with Joffrey’s style. Sure, a command-and-control manager may be great in an emergency, like if the castle…ahem, building… is on fire, but in everyday dealings, employees will eventually come to resent a tyrannical Joffrey type.

2) Next there’s Robb Stark. Robb went to war after Joffrey killed his father, King Robert’s second-in-command. Before long, Robb’s army started referring to him as “King in the North” (referring to Robb’s homeland).

Why he’d make a terrible manager: Robb has been thrust into his new role without any training or guidance. One minute he’s a loyal son, doing as his lord father commands. The next, he’s leading an army of thousands, and stuck trying to manage all the conflicts and disasters that come with the job. Robb is doing the best he can under the circumstances, but it’s not really good enough. Let Robb be a reminder to your organization not to promote employees without training them properly ahead of time.

3) Finally there’s King Robert’s brother, Stannis. Stannis is a capable leader. But he’s icy and detached, and he spends most of his time seeking the counsel of a mysterious priestess, rather than listening to the advice of the people around him.

Why he’d make a terrible manager: Arms-length managers like Stannis don’t do very well in the modern workplace. It’s not that managers should try to be best friends with their employees, but they do need to be available for guidance and encouragement. Stannis could stand to be a little more hands-on. Oh, and another thing: Don’t cultivate a Stannisian air of secrecy. Tell employees as much as you can, and let them know that if you keep some things confidential, there’s a good reason.

Hopefully being a manager in your organization isn’t as perilous as sitting on the Iron Throne of Westeros. But these three would-be kings can still provide useful lessons about management in your organization.

‘Six Management Styles You Need to Lead Effectively’

Readers: Can you think of any other management lessons to be learned from Game of Thrones? Share them in the comments (but please be respectful of those who haven’t read the books and refrain from giving away any spoilers).

Supervisors faced with what they consider insubordination may be tempted to take rapid disciplinary action. And sometimes it’s justified. But here’s a case where it wasn’t:

A Las Vegas-based time-share sales company decided its relaxed dress code was too relaxed. It ordered its in-house reps, who liked to wear untucked Tommy Bahama-style shirts, to tuck ’em in.

Nobody got the memo
One rep grilled his supervisor about the change, asking why there had been no written memo. Another rep, who that day was wearing the style of shirt targeted, chipped in with “this is pretty restrictive,” and “I didn’t sign up for this crap.” The discussion was witnessed by half a dozen other reps.

The supervisor gave both men a dressing down, and issued the first rep a written warning. It was his second for “this type of behavior” – a reference to his questioning of commission changes at a previous sales meeting.

The rep appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that his actions were the kind of “concerted activity” for “mutual aid and protection” that workers are specifically allowed to engage in under the National Labor Relations Act – whether their workplace is unionized or not. Thus, the written warning was illegal.

Takeaway for HR: Make sure line managers can distinguish legitimate questions from insubordination.

Cite: Wyndham Resort Development Corp. and Foley. No, 28-CA-22680, NLRB, 3/2/11.

"How to Terminate an Insubordinate Employee – Without Provoking a Lawsuit"

Every other week, The HR Cafe takes a moment to recognize the other great bloggers sharing their insights on leadership, compliance, and other topics relevant to HR professionals. Here are this week’s best HR blog posts from around the web:

Tim Sackett wants you to make HR suck less.

Your company has turned you into an HR manager…now what? Bert Doerhoff has some thoughts on what comes next, courtesy of Welcome to the Occupation

And Mike Haberman shows you how to document appropriately ahead of the dreaded performance evaluation.

Readers: Did you read any excellent HR posts not featured here this week? Feel free to share them in the comments, or send them to me via email.

Check out the Compliance & Management Rapid Learning Center FREE for 30 days. Get instant access to a collection of 6- to 10-minute modules perfect for training supervisors and managers throughout your organization.

Are you asking job candidates to hand over their Facebook passwords? Stop it. Stop it now.

Some employers have taken it upon themselves in recent months to ask all job candidates to surrender the login information for their Facebook and other social media profiles. The practice has been a subject of debate in HR circles for some time, but last week Facebook weighed in with their thoughts. Here’s what Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a blog post:

“As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job. And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job.”

For hiring managers, it might be nice to be able to weed out candidates with poor judgment by rooting around Facebook profiles, but Egan is absolutely right here. Demanding that users turn over their login information isn’t just unfair for them; it can put you in a lot of legal trouble.

Look at it this way: Say that, while combing through a job candidate’s Facebook page (after getting his login information), you discover that she has a child with a long-term illness. Or the person is a recovering alcoholic. Or that they weren’t born in the United States. Any of these facts, in addition to countless others, reveal your job candidate to be in a protected class.

Congratulations! You just laid the groundwork for a hiring lawsuit. Even if you have a perfectly valid reason for not hiring the candidate, the person has now got evidence that you didn’t hire them for less acceptable reasons.

Free Training Video - "How to Avoid Hiring Lawsuits: The Bias-Free Questioning Model"

Look, I get it. You want to know as much as you can about a job candidate ahead of time so you can avoid a disastrous hire. No one is saying you can’t do your due diligence and try to weed out poor or irresponsible job candidates before they become a problem. But demanding a potential hire give up their login information isn’t just an invasion of privacy for the candidate, it’s a legal disaster for hiring managers, too.

Readers: How is your organization using Facebook in its hiring efforts (if it is at all)?

Accommodating an employee’s disability may require an employer to move certain duties around among co-workers, two recent legal cases remind us.

In one case, in Arkansas, a gas station employee who suffered from seizures and was medically advised not to drive asked her employer to let her swap tasks with another employee.

Driving around

The first employee, who was supposed to drive to competing stations each day to do a gas price survey, said she could handle the co-worker’s in-store duties while the co-worker did the price survey.

But, the EEOC said, the employer refused the accommodation and fired her. The EEOC sued for disability discrimination, and the employer settled the case for $190,000.

In the other case, in Illinois, a federal court ordered auto parts retailer AutoZone to pay $415,000 in damages and lost wages to a former employee.

The employee, a sales manager, was also required to do cleaning duties that violated his medical restrictions. As a result, the EEOC said, he was injured. He now suffers permanent impairments to his neck and back.

Key to both cases: One reasonable accommodation you may have to consider is the transfer of a person’s non-essential duties to co-workers.

Note the stress on non-essential. If, for example, the sales manager had asked the employer to reallocate his sales duties to a co-worker, the employer wouldn’t have been obliged to accommodate him in that way.

Cite: EEOC v. Autozone Inc.; EEOC v. D&H Co.

Check out "ADA Accommodations: Supervisors and the Interactive Process" for FREE and arm your team with the knowledge they need to protect worker rights and avoid legal trouble.

Earlier this week, members of the New Orleans Saints organization, including head coach Sean Payton, faced fines and suspensions for their involvement in a bounty program that offered rewards for knocking opposing players out of the game.

As an HR professional, there’s a critical lesson to be learned from Payton’s mistakes. For one, Payton’s year-long suspension wasn’t just for the illegal bounty program. What ticked off the league even more were his efforts to cover it up and deny his involvement.

The same goes for the workplace. It’s bad enough when your organization does the wrong thing. Even worse is trying to cover it up, or simply sticking your head in the sand in the hopes no one will notice.

After all, if your head’s buried in the sand, guess what part of your anatomy isn’t covered?

Example: Joan comes to HR, complaining that her coworker, Roger, keeps harassing her, and she doesn’t feel comfortable working around him anymore. Roger’s always been a standout employee, and Joan’s accusations don’t quite add up. Should you simply ignore Joan’s complaints, in the hopes that the matter resolves itself? Or worse, tell Joan to keep her complaints to herself?

Of course not. That’s a perfect way to find yourself on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

‘Handling Employee Complaints: What Every Manager Needs to Know’

Learn from Payton’s mistakes. If you find out about some form of wrongdoing in your organization, own up to it as soon as possible. Even if the consequences are likely to be bad, the backlash from inaction or trying to cover it up will be exponentially worse.

You might have noticed a new face atop today’s HR Café post. That’s because effective today, I will no longer be writing for The HR Café. Taking my place will be Dave Clemens.

Dave Clemens has worked for newspapers, news services, magazines and specialized business publications — in print and on-line — on four continents during his 40 years as a reporter and editor.

He has served as deputy financial editor of the International Herald Tribune, based in Paris; editor and bureau chief for Bloomberg News, based in Tokyo and Singapore; and deputy bureau chief for the French news agency, Agence-France Presse, based in Harare, Zimbabwe. His work has also appeared in the magazine World Press Review, over the news and broadcast services of The Associated Press, and in several nationally recognized human resources, employment law and business newsletters. Suffice to say, Dave is more than qualified to take over The HR Cafe.

While Dave is doing that, I’ve started a new blog, Training & Development Insights. TDI will focus on the latest research on workplace learning and what top learning organizations are doing to conduct effective training. I invite you all to join me over at Training & Development Insights and to follow me at my new home on Twitter: @SJMeyer_RLI.

Lastly, thank you for being a loyal reader.

If your employees are normal people – and we hope they are – they probably send and receive a lot of text messages. After all, Americans now send more texts than they make cell phone calls.

What’s the best way to handle texting by employees? There are three main issues to address:

1. Productivity/safety
Somebody sending or reading a text is somebody who’s not working, at least at that moment. This may matter more to some employers than others.

If in your business productivity can take a serious hit from people texting, you may want to create a policy banning texting during work hours. (You can, of course, make exceptions for breaks and meals.)
Ditto for activities where texting can put health or safety at risk, like driving, operating heavy machinery, or handling hazardous materials.

2. Discrimination/harassment
Whether you permit texting or not, your policy should prohibit the sending, receiving, or displaying of harassing, offensive, pornographic or disruptive messages or images on personal mobile devices.

One big reason: sexually explicit messages or images, known as “sexts.” Like any other kind of sexually oriented conduct, “sexting” at work can trigger a sexual harassment claim.

"The Manager's Guide to Sexual Harassment"

3. Communication
It’s not uncommon these days for employees to communicate with supervisors by text. This is OK for some messages, but not for others.

Your policy should require that any communication about attendance, pay or hours worked, or medical or disability leaves, be via letter or e-mail, not text. You want to have copies for your files, and you won’t if a text is all there is.

Source: www.fentonkeller.com

As an HR manager, how would it make you feel if you knew employees were predisposed to work together harmoniously in teams?

Pretty good, huh? It would make your life – and that of your organization’s line managers – a good bit easier. To ensure high morale and productivity, all you’d have to do is tap into that existing fund of teamwork.

Well, you can now permit yourself to feel pretty good.

That’s because social and anthropological research shows that human beings are hard-wired to attach themselves to a group. We developed that way as a species. We learned to survive by attaching ourselves to others who could care for us in various ways.

Hitting the buttons
This research has immediate relevance for managers. It means that if you can hit the buttons that trigger “emotional attachment” in employees’ minds, you’ll be on your way to creating the kind of trust and cohesion that deliver minor miracles of group accomplishment.

It turns out that there are four main buttons available to smart managers:

1. Leadership commitment
Ever work for somebody who didn’t seem comfortable with their role as a leader? Who referred ironically to “management” or “the suits” even while ostensibly functioning as a manager? Who instead of explaining what needed to be done, said things like, “You’re adults; you figure it out”? Who habitually put off tough decisions?

If you ever did, you know how uncomfortable it made you feel. If the leader of the band isn’t taking their job seriously, how well is the band likely to make out – even survive?

Conversely, when you’re committed to being a good leader – to protecting and serving your team, so to speak – people feel your presence like an enveloping security blanket. They warm their hands at the fire of your energy. And they feel free of anxiety – free to give their best to the group.

Check out "A Four-Point Model for Leading High-Performance Teams" for FREE and give your organization’s managers the tools they need to find the best people, make the most of their talents and keep them happy and loyal.

2. Emotional availability
Leaders must “put themselves out there” if they want employees to attach themselves emotionally to the cause.

No, you don’t need to expose your most intimate, private feelings. Knowing your phobias or your fears won’t help employees. But you must keep your door open – metaphorically and literally – and be willing to engage your people on a personal level.

Managers who seldom make small talk, or are clearly uncomfortable while doing so, drive distance and detach employees emotionally. But managers who can credibly ask after the spouse and kids, or wonder how that big home improvement project is going, feed the tendency toward attachment that’s already present in the employee. Same for managers who can talk – modestly, of course – about their own latest project, or a book they’re enjoying.

3. ‘Insulation value’
“Attaching” managers insulate their employees, as much as possible, from outside stresses. Not-so-adept managers magnify these.

Example: The word is out at Ajax Fasteners that a competitor has introduced a product offering much higher performance than Ajax’s workhorse product. Employees are concerned about what this will mean for the company, and their jobs.

Manager X, a magnifier, worries aloud at team meetings about the competing product. He moans that top management is pressing him to identify cost cuts, in case profit margins start to slip.

Manager Y, an insulator, takes a different approach. She keeps her concerns to herself, and when asked directly, says it’s way too early to tell what the competing product will actually mean to Ajax. She also promises to keep her team informed.

In this way, Manager Y creates as safe a haven as there can be, given the circumstances, and fuels her employees’ desire to remain attached.

4. Consistency
It’s tough to attach oneself to a moving target. Managers who appear to be changing their minds, and the team’s direction, from day to day or week to week will find their people detaching at a rapid clip. Predictability is comforting; inconsistency isn’t.

Certainly, don’t be afraid to change things up if circumstances dictate it. But far better to make the change in an orderly fashion, and consult the team about it beforehand.

Every other week, The HR Cafe takes a moment to recognize the other great bloggers sharing their insights on leadership, compliance, and other topics relevant to HR professionals. Here are this week’s best HR blog posts from around the web:

-Peter Bregman wrote a terrific piece for the Harvard Business Review explaining why diversity training doesn’t work.

-The Human Capital Adviser shares some advice on how to help out new leaders who are struggling in their role.

-Over at HR Marketer, John Willaman manages to break down the core responsibilities of HR after a unique restaurant experience.

Check out the Compliance & Management Rapid Learning Center FREE for 30 days. Get instant access to a collection of 6- to 10-minute modules perfect for training supervisors and managers throughout your organization.

Suppose a manager tells you that a certain 60-year-old employee isn’t cutting the mustard anymore. The manager wants to get rid of her. As a smart HR person, you’re immediately concerned to avoid any appearance of age discrimination, that is, showing bias against an employee who is over 40.

But when the manager tells you who he’s thinking of as a replacement, you relax. The proposed replacement is herself 52 years old, and you don’t think it can be age discrimination if you replace one 40-plus person with another. So you approve the personnel move.

Imagine your surprise when the fired employee sues for age discrimination after all, and her lawyer points out that you CAN discriminate against an older employee by replacing her with another older employee – if there’s a significant difference in their ages, which the judge says is indeed the case here.

This age discrimination trap is just one of several that even good organizations can find themselves falling into, if they don’t know the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) backwards and forwards.

Free Training Video - "Age Discrimination: What Every Supervisor Needs to Know"

Male job candidates may be twice as likely as female candidates to overstate their past performance. That’s the key finding of a new study led by a graduate business professor at Columbia University. And it has implications for everyone involved in interviewing applicants.

The researchers tested a group of MBA students twice. First, they had them solve a set of math problems on which men and women are known to perform equally. A year later, they had the students recall their performance.

The men, on average, rated their past performance 30% better than it was. Women, on the other hand, overstated by just 15%.

What’s this mean for interviewers? A couple of things:

• Don’t let a candidate’s confident assessment of his (or her) performance outweigh other, more objective decision factors.
• Consider interview questions that can be used to “tease out” specifics of past achievement from more modest candidates – male or female.

‘The Best Interview Questions To Smoke Out Impostors’

See study at www4.gsb.columbia.edu/ideasatwork

I was conducting a workshop last month and was trying to make the point that managers lose credibility if they hesitate to give negative feedback.

I told the group to imagine I was the leader of a team that included all of them. I walked up to a guy named Bob and said, “Okay, Bob’s performance has been sub-par. I know, and you know, that Bob is hurting the progress of the team. But for some reason I’m practicing avoidance. I’m not confronting Bob. What do you, the other members of this team, think of me as a leader?”

There was silence for a moment. Then a woman – she was a CFO – mumbled under her breath in a voice dripping with contempt, “Loser.”

When I did the same workshop a day later, a guy said without hesitation, “Wimp.”

A lot of managers underestimate the expectations of their followers. They think, “The people on my team aren’t leaders themselves. They don’t know the pressures and complexities of a leadership role. They won’t pick up on the small mistakes I make.”

Don’t believe it for a second. If you pay $200 for a Broadway musical you want the performers to be flawless, even if you couldn’t sing or dance to save your life. If you’re a manager, the people on your team expect you to be totally committed to your leadership role and to do what it takes to lead effectively. They know instantly when you’re not, and they’re merciless.

In the workshop example I gave above, the “L” word and the “W” word were the participants’ way of saying to the manager, “You let us down.”

Free Training Videos - "Leadership Training for Managers & Supervisors"

Tell the truth: Is there anybody you see all the time that you don’t occasionally get tired of?

If you work with the same team for months or years, it’s likely that, every so often, you’re going to feel a sinking sensation of deja vu when listening to them or trying to get them pumped up for the next task.

Put some new spark in the relationship

So how can you combat this feeling of the same-ol’ same-ol’ when it strikes? Here are three suggestions:

• Recognize who you’re bored with. Chances are, it’s not really your team that’s boring you. It’s you! In other words, you’re in a rut and you see that reflected back in their faces. Own that feeling. It’s key to a solution.
• Focus on individuals. Maybe you see your people mostly in groups – at meetings, for instance. It’s easy to lose sight of individuals in the gray mass of the team, and at the end of the day it’s people who are interesting. Refresh that interest by writing down a couple of outstanding things about each person, and a couple of things they could do better. Tell them about the former and work with them on the latter.
• Redefine/reassign work. Sometimes when you’re tired of your team, it’s because you’ve seen them do the same work in much the same way for a long time. If you can do so without compromising essential tasks, rejig people’s assignments – with their agreement, of course. The change will rejuvenate them, and you, too.

Adapted from www.hrcapitalist.com

Check out "A Four-Point Model for Leading High-Performance Teams" for FREE and give your organization’s managers the tools they need to find the best people, make the most of their talents and keep them happy and loyal.

It’s bad enough when a line manager has to deal with a legal-type complaint from an employee that may or may not be justified. So no manager in his or her right mind wants to make things even worse.

And yet, sometimes that’s what managers do, more often out of lack of knowledge than any malice.

What can easily happen is that a supervisor, faced with a discrimination complaint, request for FMLA leave, or other exercise of an employee’s legal rights, turns around and commits what the law considers “adverse action” against the employee.

When that happens, it no longer matters whether the employee was right or wrong in the initial situation. The supervisor has broken the law by retaliating.

Free Training Video - "Retaliation: Four Key Mistakes That Supervisors Must Avoid"

Time for another edition of the HR Roundup. Check out these recent posts from the best HR bloggers around the web this week:

-Lance Haun teamed up with the folks from Hard Rock International (owners of the Hard Rock Cafe) to share 10 things you can do to build a team of rock stars in your organization.

-HR Ringleader Trish McFarlane offers strategies to overcome stress and other obstacles in the workplace

-Daniel Newman shares some advice on what to do when a new hire doesn’t work out.

-Finally, on the 108th birthday of the famed children’s writer, 6 Leadership Lessons from Dr. Seuss.

Is there an HR blog that you think deserves to be featured on a future HR roundup? Send us an email and let us know!

Check out the Compliance & Management Rapid Learning Center FREE for 30 days. Get instant access to a collection of 6- to 10-minute modules perfect for training supervisors and managers throughout your organization.

Imagine you’re reviewing an employee’s performance for the past six months, and he suddenly reveals he’s been suffering from severe migraine headaches that impair his ability to concentrate.

Wow. You were about to give him an Unsatisfactory rating, which is the first step out the door in your organization. But now you don’t know what to do. You realize that what he’s got may add up to a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act, and you’re worried that if you give him the rating his performance warrants, you may be breaking the law.

Are you?

Actually, no. The ADA doesn’t require that you ignore poor performance by employees with disabilities.

The law also doesn’t oblige you to:

• Raise a performance rating, or in any way give an evaluation that doesn’t reflect actual performance, or
• Withhold disciplinary action, including termination, if it’s warranted by the poor performance.

But – and this is important – in the situation above, the ADA may require you to offer an accommodation that helps the employee improve his performance, and thus avoid being dismissed another six months down the road.

Check out "ADA Accommodations: Supervisors and the Interactive Process" for FREE and arm your team with the knowledge they need to protect worker rights and avoid legal trouble.

Most managers respect the people who work for them. But often, that message doesn’t get through.

Why? Managers unthinkingly commit gaffes that send the wrong message to employees – “you aren’t truly valued as individuals.”

To ensure people know they’re appreciated, try these techniques:

1. Respect privacy
Make sure any discussions about personal or sensitive issues occur in private. Also, depending on your organization’s policy, refrain from or minimize monitoring of employees’ activities and communications.

2. Communicate individually
Blanket, admonitory e-mails or memos may occasionally have to be sent, but try to avoid them wherever possible. They make people feel like part of a balky, disobedient herd.

3. Discipline people, not teams
Sometimes managers issue group reprimands to avoid singling somebody out. But this has the same effect as the mistake in #2.

4. Know them as people
As a manager, you walk a fine line when it comes to workers’ personal lives. Some like to keep their non-work lives out of the workplace. But you should know what’s important to them as people.

5. Treat them like adults
If you micromanage employees’ behavior, it suggests you don’t trust them to do their jobs. Give them more control when you can.

6. Do unto others…
Managers should accord employees the same level of respect and dignity they themselves would like to be shown.

‘Six Management Styles You Need to Lead Effectively’

Source: “30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers,” by Bruce L. Katcher.

Ever have one of your direct reports go around you to your boss? It’s not a comfortable feeling. It risks making you look bad to your manager, and it shows a lack of understanding between you and the employee.

So what do you do? Call the employee in and read him the riot act?

Communicating, in a way
Stop a minute and consider what the employee is really doing. He knows chances are near 100% you’ll learn what he did. So, in an odd way, he’s trying to communicate with you.
You need to find out two things:

• What the employee is trying to communicate, and
• What both of you can do to help ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Before you call the person in, talk to your boss. Work out an agreement that she’ll refer any employee back to you who goes to her in the future without having approached you first. Then meet with the employee and:

1. Acknowledge what happened. Make clear you know what he did.
2. Find out why. Does the employee think you’re remote or unapproachable? Does he worry you’ll pooh-pooh his ideas?
3. Set strategy. Ask how the two of you should handle the problem so it doesn’t recur. Put the onus on him to figure out how to change. But also determine what you need to do.
4. State expectations. Let the employee know what you’ll expect in the future and what will happen if he goes over your head again.

Free Training Videos - "Leadership Training for Managers & Supervisors"

We’ve all heard what a great company Zappos is. Their service is so good that customers evangelize to friends, neighbors, family and colleagues, creating possibly the greatest word-of-mouth marketing machine ever.

How do they do it? Well, it obviously has something to do with people selection. Turns out they have a fascinating approach to disqualifying people who either wouldn’t fit or simply don’t have what it takes to do the job effectively:

They pay you to quit.

If you get past the initial job interview and enter Zappos’ four-week training program, you’re offered money in exchange for your resignation at the end of each week. The conversation goes something like, “If you don’t think this job is right for you, leave now and the money is yours.” The sum gradually increases and caps at $2,000 after week four.

This is no frivolous gesture. It’s anchored in hard calculations about the high cost of training people and then having them leave. If people aren’t going to succeed, Zappos wants them to self-select and opt out as quickly as possible.

‘The Best Interview Questions To Smoke Out Impostors’

You’re not likely to adopt the Zappos post-hire bribe. I know of no other company that has. But what motivated them to do it – the high cost of bad hires – should motivate us all to do whatever we can to smoke out unqualified job candidates before we hire them.

photo credit: theritters

Based on the facts presented in the scenario below, how do you think the court ruled on this employment-law case?

Yolanda Marsh knocked on the office door of operations manager Cliff McDaniel. “Come in, Yolanda,” he said genially.

“I am so sorry to bother you, Mr. McDaniel,” she said. “But I’m at the end of my rope with Bobbi Lerner.”

“Your manager?” he asked.

“Yes,” Yolanda replied. “As a Bible-believing Christian, I’m supposed to forgive those who treat me harshly. But Bobbi has just gone too far in attacking my religion, and I felt like I had to come to you.”

“What’s going on?” Cliff asked.

Couldn’t go to church
“She stopped me from attending a service project at my church,” Yolanda said. “It was on the morning of July 4, but Bobbi said I had to work the holiday — even after my team leader said I could have the day off.

“And she made me start at 8, four hours before everybody else,” Yolanda continued. “If I’d been able to come in at noon, I could have made my church event. She said if I went to it she’d fire my, well, my behind. And that’s not all…”

“Go on,” Cliff said.

“Sometimes Bobbi tells me to go to my – I’m embarrassed – my effing God to see if he can save my job. And one day she showed me her new pair of shoes and said, ‘Your God didn’t buy me these. I did.”

Free Training Video - "Religious Accommodation: What Every Supervisor Must Know"

Cliff sighed. “I’ll speak to Bobbi,” he promsied. “Look, she’s a little rough, but you know her bark is worse than her bite. You need to laugh her off sometimes.”

Things didn’t improve with Bobbi, and Yolanda felt forced to quit. She sued for religiously hostile work environment. Did she win?

The decision
Yes, Yolanda got the court to agree that her lawsuit was strong enough to go to trial, forcing the company to either settle out of court or incur further expenses defending itself before a jury.

The company argued that supervisor Bobbi’s actions weren’t frequent or severe enough to create a hostile work environment. But the court disagreed, saying Bobbi displayed a continuous pattern of “acrimony based on religion” that was enough to affect the conditions under which Yolanda had to work.

When a supervisor engages in verbally abusive behavior toward an employee, this can radically harm the person’s ability to do his or her job. And when the abuse is based on a legally protected characteristic — like race, sex, religion, age or disability – the supervisor’s conduct becomes even more problematic. Such abuse is a betrayal of the organization’s trust in the supervisor, and a surefire trigger for a discrimination lawsuit.

Cite: Dediol v. Best Chevrolet Inc., No. 10-30767, 5th Cir., 9/12/11. Fictionalized for dramatic effect.

photo credit: baltimoreheritage

Time for another edition of the HR Roundup, where we highlight some of the best stuff from the best sales blogs on the Web…

-At the HR C-Suite, Jim Bouchard ponders which is more important: Talent or discipline?

- Eric B. Meyer (no relation) suggests the right and wrong way to ask for FMLA Certification

- Finally, Jay Shepherd suggests that your policy on Twitter and social media should be able to fit in 140 characters or less (the size of a tweet)

Is there an HR blog that you think deserves to be featured on a future HR roundup? Send us an email and let us know!

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